Saturday, March 08, 2008

Complete Orthodoxy

It took me 10 months but I've finished recording G. K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy for Librivox, the free audio book site. It's also got a page at the Internet Archive. Talk about a labor of love; Orthodoxy is one of a handful of books that truly blew me away when I read them. Orthodoxy I picked up almost at random in the Arcadia, California public library and read it every morning while riding to work on the bus. Why I was riding the bus at the time I don't remember, but I am eternally thankful for the reason whatever it was. I couldn't wait to read each new section and was disappointed it was such a short book.

Chesterton is a lively, joyful writer, full of witticisms and tangents, fun to read. I purposely tried to inject some of this joie de vivre into my narration of his book, and read it a bit faster than I would some other works.

I've been recording sections of different audio books on Librivox for over a year now, but I wanted my first solo effort to be Orthodoxy. It is immensely satisfying to finish it and have it released into the world by the Librivox staff.

If you wish, you can write a brief introduction of the book you record (or you can swipe one from Wikipedia). For most of the 10 months I had a short placeholder blurb set up for that purpose, but tried to replace it with this more detailed synopsis. I missed my deadline for that though and the blurb is what you'll find when you look up Orthodoxy in the Librivox catalog. For posterity, here's what I intended:

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a well known British writer, thinker, and social commentator of the early 20th century. His prodigious output included histories, biographies, fiction (he was the author of the popular Father Brown detective series), poetry, travelogues, and essays on virtually every major issue of his day. Written as a follow up to his book Heretics, in which he took on the leading thinkers and ideologies of his time, Orthodoxy describes his own beliefs. Chesterton recounts a personal odyssey in which he was forced to admit time and again that the most satisfying answers to life's interlocking riddles were given by the Christian faith. Now a century old, Orthodoxy is still startlingly contemporary and is regarded as one of the finest apologetic works for thinking people. -- Pleonic

4 comments:

A.B. said...

Please accept my sincerest thanks for making this book available in audio. What a tremendous labour of love! I have a good friend who is a devotee of G.K. Chesterton and I am sure he will enjoy this immensely as I do not think he has actually read Orthodoxy. Thank you again. God be with you frater.

Pleonic said...

Thank you for your kind words and I hope that your friend will be edified by Mr. Chesterton's words. I see from your profile that you are contemplating the life of a religious. May the Lord bless you on this journey!

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

I've really enjoyed listening to you read this, and think that you've dealt with it really well. As an Englishman can I just make one small comment over pronuciation which does affect the clarity. A couple of times Chesterton refers to Reading Gaol. You've pronounced it as it's written, which is entirely understandable, however such is the idosyncracy of British English that this should be prounced "Reding Jail" and refers to the Jail in the city of that name where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated.

Doesn't spoil the reading overall, but it did have me puzzled for a few minutes when I was trying to work out what the text was talking about!

Cheers,

John

Gerrie said...

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
I cant thank you enough for recording this. God Bless you and your family.